[arch-dev-public] Package checking

[Jan de Groot]

A lot of projects include a "check" target in their makefiles. Right
now, we don't use these checks and just upload a package after compiling
it, sometimes even without a runtime test.

I would propose to add checks to important packages. Examples include
glibc, glib2, cairo, MySQL, Mozilla stuff and more. Running make check
can result in better package quality. Upstream usually runs these tests
before releasing, but they don't test every possible combinations of
packages that a distribution ships.

To implement this, I would propose to have some kind of check function
inside the PKGBUILD, which can be called by makepkg if "check" is in the
options array. Other option is to include make check inside the build()
function, but that will make it non-optional.

This package checking stuff could get implemented in an automatic build
bot in the future. Not only will that build bot detect packages which
don't build anymore, but it will also detect regressions caused by
package updates. A package like xulrunner or firefox could pass the
check without errors on package upload, but it could break after
updating cairo or gtk2 for example.